Title of Book Seven Revealed! – The Running Grave

J. K. Rowling has revealed the title of Book 7 and it isn’t one that was on our radar! @CormStrikeFan who administers the Strike Fans website and has had remarkable success in gleaning new details via the medium of coaxing new Twitter Headers asked for a clue, and Rowling responded with “Disentangle the hanging venturer”.

 

Our friends at The Strike and Ellacott Files podcast provided the solution with The Running Grave! A quick search of the phrase “Running Grave” reveals the somewhat obscure Dylan Thomas poem When Like a Running Grave.

When, Like a Running Grave
When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,
Love in her gear is slowly through the house,
Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,
Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,
Deliver me who, timid in my tribe,
Of love am barer than Cadaver’s trap
Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape
Of the bone inch,

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
Heart of Cadaver’s candle waxes thin,
When blood, spade—handed, and the logic time
Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
From maid and head,

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time’sjacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with virgin o
In the straight grave,

Stride through Cadaver’s country in my force,
My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone
Despair of blood, faith in the maiden’s slime,
Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain
On fork and face.

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.
No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer
Descends, my masters, on the entered honour.
You hero skull, Cadaver in the hanger
Tells the stick, ‘fail’.

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,
The cancer’s fusion, or the summer feather
Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,
Nor city tar and subway bored to foster
man through macadam.

I damp the waxlights in your tower dome.
Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver’s shoot
Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift,
Love’s twilit nation and the skull of state,
Sir, is your doom.

Everything ends, the tower ending and,
(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,
Ball of the foot depending from the sun,
(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,
The actions’ end.

All, men my madmen, the unwholesome sind
With whistler’s cough contages, time on track
Shapes in a cinder death; love his trick,
Happy Cadaver’s hunger as you take
The kissproof world.

The very quick post is sure to be the start of much speculation. Let me know your thoughts down below!

J. K. Rowling and the I Ching

No sooner than the excitement for J. K. Rowling’s new Twitter header died down, then as a further mark of her esteem for @CormStrikeFan, a new header has been posted!

This time we have a portion of a mandala constructed along the principles of I Ching divination.

 

I am sadly ignorant of bot the I Ching and Carl Jung, but Jung is said to have taken an interest in the system, so this may be related to Jungian psychology.

Even to the most biased eye, it is obvious that this book represents one long admonition to careful scrutiny of one’s own character, attitude, and motives

Jung quoted in: Smith, Richard J. (2012). The I Ching: A Biography.

 

Chris Calderon – The Hermetic Mystery Cycle of Dorothy L. Sayers

 

Chris Calderon, long time stalwart of Hogwarts Professor has submitted a guest post that argues that three of Dorothy L. Sayers  Wimsey novels (Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night), that feature Harriet Vane, form an alchemical sequence. Chris makes a compelling argument, check it out after the break:

[Read more…]

A New Year and a New Twitter Header

On Sunday 1st January, @CormStrikeFan who runs the wonderful Strike Fans website tweeted a cheeky request to J. K. Rowling: “Waiting for @jk_rowling to change her Christmas header photo to something Strikey”. Wonderfully and unbelievably she responded the following day!

 

The new header is a picture of Cromer Pier a location we last saw in the header from 4th March 2022. After a brief visit to King’s Lynne in The Ink Black Heart, it now seems certain that Strike will return to Norfolk in book 7.

The news about Montgomery was so cheering that Strike didn’t much mind his first glimpse of a windmill, or the change in landscape to wide flat fens and marshland. He never went voluntarily into Norfolk and in fact had a slight prejudice against the whole county, because the worst of all the many places to which Strike’s novelty-chasing, peripatetic mother had taken her son and daughter to live had been a Norfolk commune, a place Strike sincerely hoped no longer existed.

The Ink Black Heart Ch. 48

Let me know what you think of the new header in the comments down below.

 

Beatrice Groves – The Winter Solstice and Beira, Queen of Winter

We are today (21st December 2022) at the darkest part of the year for the Northern Hemisphere: the winter solstice. The shadows are long and the golden days of Summer seem a long time ago. Now is the perfect time to push your stool a little closer to the fire, and warm your hands on a mug of tea the colour of creosote. Beatrice Groves, Research Lecturer and tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, and author of  Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, has written a Hogwarts Professor Guest Post: The Winter Solstice and Beira, Queen of Winter. [Read more…]